[Popcon-developers] [Patch] Would like to help out with popcon, extensions to hardware info

[Bryce Nesbitt]

Hello,

I am interested in helping out with patches to popcon.  I've attached a 
sample patch, though I realize it will need to be reformatted.  But I 
would like to get some comments on the proposed changes, as one of them 
is large.

The patch fixes a few minor typos, and does two bigger things:

1) It reports architecture specific libraries (e.g. 
"/var/lib/dpkg/info/libxi6:amd64.list").  Under the present popcon 
distributed with Ubuntu those libraries are simply not found by the main 
loop, and cause a Perl warning when processed.

2) I'd like to propose extending popcon to report some limited hardware 
details.  I'm interested in eventually submitting a patch to have 
popularity-contest report machines on which suspend and resume are 
working properly for energy savings.  In order to do that requires 
knowing the vendor and model of the motherboard.

Having an idea of the hardware in use can help guide regression testing, 
and more importantly help users select hardware.  In this case if the 
goal is to build a Linux box with maximum power savings, it is very 
helpful to know which types of hardware work well with suspend in the field.

Popcon was designed to collect package data.  But it has a large 
installed base, which makes it a very interesting platform to collect 
hardware data.
Plus it's written in Perl, which I like ;-).

The privacy implications of collecting such data seem compatible, in 
spirit at least, with the privacy implications of what popcon is doing 
now.  What are your thoughts?  How open are you to extending popcon's scope?
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